Microsoft .NET Apps on OpenShift – Wait, what?

Since we launched our award winning OpenShift Online public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) service three years ago and OpenShift Enterprise private PaaS in 2012, customers have often asked us, “What about Microsoft .NET apps on OpenShift?” We listened, and are excited to announce that we are collaborating with Uhuru Software to bring Microsoft .NET and SQL Server capabilities to OpenShift, as an open source community-driven effort in OpenShift Origin. OpenShift Origin is the upstream community project that drives innovation for both our OpenShift Online service and OpenShift Enterprise product.

Why are we doing this? We are Red Hat, and as the world’s largest commercial open source company, we deeply believe in customer choice. We also embrace the innovation that comes from our open source communities and our partner ecosystem. With a host of .NET applications already deployed throughout enterprises, integrating Microsoft environments for application workloads can provide OpenShift users with the most complete developer experience. That’s why we were excited to have Uhuru collaborate with the OpenShift Origin community on this effort as the first step. This will then enable us to bring this capability to our Online and Enterprise customers in the future.

With OpenShift, Red Hat has always aimed to provide developers with the ultimate in flexibility and choice of programming languages, frameworks and services. In other words, we want developers to simply pick what they need and start coding. By adding .NET and Microsoft SQL Server to the list of available OpenShift platforms, Uhuru helps us extend this commitment, enabling developers to create .NET applications using familiar OpenShift workflows. With Uhuru, OpenShift can deliver a PaaS solution for .NET that is native to Windows while still enabling the secure, multi-tenant architecture that users have come to expect from our platform.

Whether you’re running an environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows, this new .NET on OpenShift solution will enable DevOps to provide a standardized application environment with consistent administration capabilities across both by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure. This means developers can easily write an application using a .NET frontend that is on Windows with a MySQL backend on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, all through the OpenShift self-service interface.

How are we doing this? With open source code contributed by Uhuru, OpenShift is able to provide application isolation for multiple .NET apps on the same Windows instance. MCollective handles communication between the OpenShift broker and Windows node using a Ruby-based client. The picture below demonstrates this:

If you’re interested in contributing to this effort, you can check the project out on GitHub and this will also soon be merged into Origin along with additional documentation and videos. Microsoft .NET and SQL Server capabilities are also available for technical preview for customers that want a closer look. Interested customers and prospects can send an email to openshiftdotnet@redhat.com for more information.